On Nov 27, 2004, at 10:08, Jane Partridge wrote:
Misting the clothes to aid ironing is one thing, but using a mouthful of
water to do so might not be such a good idea - the water would surely
get mixed with some saliva, and saliva contains enzymes, and, if you are
not too well, germs - could these, over time, cause problems for the
textile and its user? It wouldn't be much good, say, boiling sheets from
a sick bed in the copper, and then re-infect them when ironing, would
it?
Well... Where should I start... :)
The sick ones didn't do the laundry.
If we thought about germs at all, we'd have assumed that the heat of the iron would have been as good as the heat in the boiling water, for killing them. What we didn't trust was dry-cleaning and second-hand clothes that we couldn't boil and iron the heck out of ("you never know what that person died of" my aunt would say)
Our boiling vats were aluminium, not copper. Both, presumably, "lent" something extra to the linens boiled in them.
The soap we used for washing and for boiling the linens with was the "brown" soap - with lye in it.
The last but one rinse often included "blueing" (to, perversely, whiten things out <g>), and I have no idea what went into that.
The last rinse often had slimy goo (aka: starch) added to the water; no clue what went into that, either.
The stuff (both clothing and linens) was then hung out to dry - outside, if the sun was out, inside, if it was not. Outside, there'd be birds and bugs, all eagerly waiting to deposit whatever. Inside, you hung the stuff in the kitchen, because it dried the fastest there (besides, we didn't *have* a bathroom in the village until 2000, and not enough room in the bathroom in Warsaw to accomodate all the laundry <g>). You figure out what got deposited there (esp in the village, where the cooking was done on a coal stove, where the temperature was regulated by the number of "rings" fitted in the holes).
Given all the abuse that went on before, a bit of saliva in the misting water doesn't seem to be worth spit :) Of course, we didn't chew tobacco - that would have stained the stuff...
--- Tamara P Duvall http://lorien.emufarm.org/~tpd Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland)
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